Summary:In Final Fantasy XIII, you will embark on a journey through the cityworld of Cocoon and the outerworld of Pulse. Along the way, you will encounter diverse allies who will fight alongside you. Execute powerful attacks with weapons and magic, and summon the enigmatic Eidolons with an evolvedIn Final Fantasy XIII, you will embark on a journey through the cityworld of Cocoon and the outerworld of Pulse. Along the way, you will encounter diverse allies who will fight alongside you. Execute powerful attacks with weapons and magic, and summon the enigmatic Eidolons with an evolved Active Time Battle system. Experience seamless transitions between real time gameplay and in-game cinematics. Do you have the courage to face your destiny?…Expand

With a story that would be considered nothing special, FFXII shines with its fast-paced combat and challenging difficulty. Although it introduces many changes to the series, it provides a good amount of things to explore providing hours of fun.

People here are complaining for the smallest of reasons. This game is a visual treat with some of the best music in games. It is an AAA RPGPeople here are complaining for the smallest of reasons. This game is a visual treat with some of the best music in games. It is an AAA RPG which is linear for most of the game. Remember when we were blaming Square Enix for launching it only on the consoles? Well its here finally on PC now so stop complaining and start getting immersed in the world of FFXIII…Expand

its not about a quick cash scheme for the release of the final fantasy trilogy to pc.over 40million dollars was used to bring final fantasyits not about a quick cash scheme for the release of the final fantasy trilogy to pc.over 40million dollars was used to bring final fantasy only to the consoles and its didnt sells very good and they lost a lot of money.its only right for them to make a profit and squareinix remains the best unlike their counterpart ubisoft who doesnt know how to port console games to pc like far cry 4 and assassins creed unity…Expand

I've been playing this game for 8 hours now, and so far I'm enjoying it. The port imo is pretty good, it runs surprisingly well on my toasterI've been playing this game for 8 hours now, and so far I'm enjoying it. The port imo is pretty good, it runs surprisingly well on my toaster (Core 2 Duo E8400 @3,00 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Geforce 9600 GT), and I don't mind the 720p lock. It doesn't stutter, it runs almost flawless, for me it looks beautiful and so far I didn't run in any bugs yet.

The story is interesting, the characters are great and the game-play is neither too easy, nor too hard, just fun. I've played most of the games in the series, and this one isn't as bad as others say. It's really worth the price.…Expand

FFXIII is ok game that tries to break certain traditional JRPG gameplay conventions but fails miserably. Reasons for that are so obvious thatFFXIII is ok game that tries to break certain traditional JRPG gameplay conventions but fails miserably. Reasons for that are so obvious that it makes you wonder if the game developers playtested the game at all before releasing it. As a person who had never played FFXIII or read reviews of it before it was released at Steam I was surprised to see how low the series has fallen.

I'll try to keep this review short and I won't go into specifics of why most of the role-playing aspects of the game are flawed beyond any measure. FFXIII isn't an RPG game (although that's pretty subjective thing). The reason I say that is because the core design of the RPG elements is a broken mess. There are also broken features that should have been removed from the game before the release (such as the inventory management which is useless in a game such as this one). There also are no towns or any kind of hubs in this game (they were apparently redeemed useless feature and removed from the game).

The director of FFXIII probably took drugs while doing this game because the camera always follows events in a such a way (esp. in action scenes) that player cannot track the scene and understand what's happening. And that's a bad thing because most of the time spent with the game is spent watching lengthy pre-rendered cutscenes filled with action player never gets to experience during the actual gameplay.

The game is one lengthy tutorial of various things. FFXIII will keep constantly introducing player new stuff. The game also heavily underestimates intelligence of its own audience. When I broke five hour mark the game was still introducing new gameplay stuff to me in forms of new battle mechanics. Soon after it added simple level up system that's nothing more than glorified "use points to buy character development" but it's presented as a really complicated semi-linear 3D tree of things that makes it seem more complicated than what it in reality is.

The level designers were obviously on drugs since everything is a linear path forward (well, mostly). But they're one of the better looking pipes ever. The writing of the game is horrible and the characters are mostly horrible personalities that player has trouble in relating to. Lightning especially. She's not this "mysterious older sister" who wants to protect her little sister. Character development portion of the game is just fail. I don't want to analyse it deeply here. Let me just say that I'm willing to bet that Lightning is the reason why FFXIII-2 and LR:FFXIII failed. You cannot build a game trilogy that uses such a personality lacking character as its keystone.

The best things about the FFXIII are the visual design of the game and the sounds. Visual design is just marvellous although it lacks some central point where you'd aim your interest at. It's full of small details and things that make it really beautiful but it makes the big picture really difficult to see. Soundscape is interesting and well designed. Most of the music is nothing special but there's nothing particularly bad about it.

However the Windows-PC port kind of ruins some of these aspects. It's based on Xbox 360 version which apparently had audio and visual issues. Things such as shadows are being drawn wrong or are missing entirely. Hair of the characters looks awful providing stark contrast to the cutscenes. Or some sounds being lower quality (to make it fit into DVD format Xbox 360 uses) than in PS3 version. All of those issues are present in Windows-PC version not to mention that the port introduces few issues on its own.

Unlike what Square-Enix wrote about the game, it is not optimised for PCs. Usually PC games support multiple resolutions, FFXIII supports only one. That resolution being 720p. That's probably the worst issue with the port. Another issue is that keyboard and mouse cannot be fully binded to keys of your own choosing outside few limited keys. I didn't have issues with the size of the game. There are 25GBs of prerendered videos with the game. And since the game comes with the Japanese audio that size is doubled.

English voice acting in FFXIII was better than usually in these games but the Japanese voice acting is so much better that I ended up playing with the Japanese audio and English subtitles. It felt more natural.

Overall the FFXIII for Steam is fairly standard port of Xbox 360 game. It has all the standard faults and then some. But it's fully playable game that works and you will not encounter many bugs. It's a decently good port. I'm giving it neutral 6/10 because of the game itself and not because of the port. Overall I wouldn't probably recommend this unless player is keen Final Fantasy fan or interested in new Final Fantasy games. Average player probably doesn't have what it takes to sit through this game. This just isn't very good game and can be boring at times. However it's entertaining most of the time.…Expand

There are few games that make me so sit on the fence as Final Fantasy 13(FF13 for short). On the one hand there are the splendid graphicsThere are few games that make me so sit on the fence as Final Fantasy 13(FF13 for short). On the one hand there are the splendid graphics which bring the characters to life and those are given depth by their own back story that is set against the overall story line. On the other hand is much of the background is simply overdone: everyone has a chip on his or her shoulder, an axe to grind and a bone to pick. In addition the game play is aggravating by the continuous interruption with cut scenes and the story is a confused mess.

The best way to explain the game play is to imagine that it is like a movie inter spaced with fights. It is almost choice free too.There is just one path to follow, although sometimes you get to pick an alternative route to get around a group of enemies or use it to attack them from behind. There is nothing else to choose from in the dialog or the story line. It is all given and triggered at various points. You won't be selecting from dialog options, selecting quests, support a specific side over another or even get to choose what to do first.

The only choices in the game are related to the fights. There is the phase out side of combat, which is to prepare characters for battle by upgrading their equipment, assigning points to improve them and arranging battle tactics. This phase is as important, or even more so, than the tactics used in the fights.

The battles themselves are all about pressing buttons to execute preconfigured and auto generated stratagems as quickly as possible. The clock is relentless and can only be set to slow, which isn't that much slower than normal. You get rewarded for speed which increases the pressure to yank away at the buttons. Even more so because what you want to achieve is to stagger an opponent which is done with drowning them in magic as quickly as possible, which then allows to do a heap more damage with your normal attacks. This staggering only lasts for a short while so you have to hurry those normal attacks as well.

Even in relation to the battles most choices have been taken away. It takes a while before you get to choose whom to put in your teams. Up till then your teams are a given based on the story. You do not have much control over their upgrades. All upgrading follows a predefined path. You just add them when you got the experience points. Classes, called roles, are a given as well and only lateron you can assign all classes, which is a useless option as your character only excel in a few.. Trying to farm enemies is useless as you won't progress further until you reached a certain stage in the story.

With each switch to another group, forced upon by the story, you have to reconfigure your battle tactics, even if you get control over the same group of characters. And the storyline switches a lot and even changes the teams. At one time I got a team of two characters for a handful of fights(most fights taking around a minute) then the story switched to another group, and then yet another again after a few fights. Each sets of fights separated by several cut scenes running for up to five minutes each sometimes.

The biggest flaw in the narrative is the lack of focus. The story has six main characters each with different backgrounds and their own demons to fight and their skeletons in the closet. But those are just the playable ones. Next them there are various others who cannot be played but are also given time.
Add to this that the story is told in bits and pieces.And with a world that is totally new, which is also revealed in bit and pieces, a lot of information is released piecemeal. After a while the tendency to just skip a tale and get on with the game is almost overwhelming.

At this point I actually have become so disinterested in the story that I am almost on the point of stopping with the game. But somehow it keeps me hoping that there will be something more just around the corner. And it seems to cultivate that feeling by offering new things at various times This is almost only related to combat, and by now I seriously doubt that the game will anything else than a wholly linear button smashing experience.

The instructions for playing game is a dismal failure when you can't get past the opening, the keyboard setup is just plain stupid. I can onlyThe instructions for playing game is a dismal failure when you can't get past the opening, the keyboard setup is just plain stupid. I can only assume that it gets worse, if you can past area 1 aka the beach.…Expand